"M" is four and already can express the body language of a strutting gang banger. I hope his talent turns out to be mimicry instead of violence.

Unfortunately, his talent is proving to be both.

He's been a kid to watch for some time, skirting the edges, expert like a con in the yard with shoves and bumps that send a message to the other kids without being seen by the teachers.

Early this morning, I stepped into a dispute between "M" and "D." M caught D's pigtail in his teeth and pulled, so D swung at M. Often you don't see what precipitated these battles, and the kids' accounts are unreliable, so you separate them, remind them how to work out their differences peacefully and then watch for flare-ups.

It didn't take long before D was mad at M for something else. I suspect M had taken a Matchbox car from him. D snatched the car back, and it was M's turn to be mad. I squatted down and put an arm in front of each boy. I told M to use his words if he was upset and to tell me what happened.

Instead, from three feet away, he flung the other metal car he held at D's head, hitting him just above the eye. The blow didn't break the skin, but impact an inch lower could have been serious.

M got a time out. When it was over he acted better for a while, but then started pushing the envelope. I won't bore you with the different little incidents. None were serious by themselves, but a troubling pattern was developing.

Later in the morning, M had two plastic microscope slides from the science kit. One he pretended was a lighter, and he used it to light pretend candles on a pretend birthday cake, then sang happy birthday to no one in particular.

Cute four-year-old stuff, right? Then he put the other slide in his mouth and, pinching it like a dooby, lit it and puffed out his cheeks like he was holding in the smoke.

(Another four-year-old who has already been on a behavior plan was sent home yesterday. Among her infractions: pulling down her pants and telling a boy to "lick my stuff.")

Working in a homeless center preschool, I don't see a normal classroom of kids — it's a class cauldron and education crucible. A place where somedays I'm hopeful, but every day I see how challenges in our schools arise out of a complex set of circumstances that aren't addressed by simplistic "solutions" and analysis like this.

M started his time on the playground sitting on the bench because of earlier infractions. When a teacher released him, he asked me if I'd give him a shoulder ride, as I'd been doing for the other kids.

Okay, I said, but first, let's talk. I want you to do a better job of listening to your teachers. I want you to stop pushing and hitting other kids. (I could already see his eyes wandering.) Can you do that? Will you try to make better choices in class this afternoon?

After some work, I got him to repeat what I had asked and secured a promise that he would do better the rest of the day.

Within five minutes after his shoulder ride, M slugged me hard in the crotch. I'm not even sure I can say why.

Today, "G" was going around with a runny nose and leaving behind a slipstream of disruption. He's three, at the young end of our preschool class, and developmentally delayed. That means he has trouble following directions and focusing for long. In the classroom where he is the smallest of 17 kids, G takes up a disproportionate amount of space and attention.

He doesn't talk much, and when he does, he tends to repeat a phrase rather than speak in complete sentences. "Clifford dog, Clifford dog, Clifford dog," for example, cropped up several times in other contexts after I read the book, Clifford Visits His Family. When the teacher was asking the class about emotions being expressed in photos of children, he responded "Birthday cake, birthday cake," to a picture of a smiling girl holding balloons and wearing a party hat.

On the playground, he wasn't a menace, exactly, but a restless urgency crackled around him like an electrical field. And today, he wasn't the only one like that at the shelter. We had four or five acting out some level of distress all morning

I can't spend time with kids like G and let pass a comment I read this morning, posted to MN2020's Tuesday Talk by W.D. Hamm:

As for the majority of welfare recipients being truly needy, you didn't even touch on the families that are 3 and 4 generations on welfare, of course they don't live in your neighborhood so how could you be expected to know.

Generational welfare does exist, and it appears to be intractable. Some research indicates it hasn't diminished despite "welfare reforms" aimed at booting families off welfare and pushing them to work.

The implication from critics is that a "welfare state" has caused dependency, when I think the reality is more complex. More likely, child and family welfare has taken hold of an intractable problem and made life better for some people, but not others. Welfare's critics would pray/shame/cut this dependency away, although they have no evidence that their so-called reforms would work any better in the long run.

I'm sure some families hand down the message that public assistance is the way to get along in life. What child doesn't learn something from its parents? But a child inherits more than a bad attitude or a desire not to repeat past mistakes. These families also have low incomes, poor education and work histories, physical and mental disabilities, dysfunction and drug use that would exist whether they were on or off welfare.

And the kids asked for none of it.

A kid like G is starting out behind, in ways I can only begin to comprehend. Spending time in a shelter at public expense may someday make him more likely to be on welfare himself. It may teach him tricks that allow him to work the system later. But his time in our preschool and our work on his individual learning plan might also make a difference. We don't know for sure in his individual case.

So we can try. Or we can flush him now.

If you've held him and wiped his nose and helped him get his arm untwisted from his shirt, it's hard to turn your back. If you've seen him come up with Birthday cake! when there's no cake in the picture, it's hard to say his cognitive abilities make him hopeless.

It's so simple to "cut costs" and "reform the system" if you've never been in the system or worked with the people who are using it to get themselves out of a terrible hole. It's so easy to judge peering through your blinds. It's painless to dismiss the invisible G—at least for the one doing the dismissing.

W.D. Hamm lives in a rural area east of Grand Rapids, so I wonder how he's acquired his knowledge of how the welfare system works and who is using it. But he makes a point I agree with—you can't know much if you don't know the people you're stereotyping.

Unless you know kids like G and care about where they are in 20 years, how are you going to reform anything?

Last week we had 18 kids, and most days, the two teachers have to manage without volunteers. Believe me, a 1/9 teacher-to-preschooler ratio is two-and-a-half handfuls, especially when the kids are still not fully socialized and are coming from stressful conditions.

"K" and his younger sister are both in my class. He's the biggest kid by far, so it's good that he's relatively gentle. He was standing at the bottom of slide, blocking it, and another kid banged into him. The slider bounced to the ground and started crying. I told K he wasn't supposed to do that — it wasn't safe — and then he cried much longer than the other kid.

"M" is four and already can express the body language of a strutting gang banger. I hope his talent turns out to be mimicry instead of violence.

I'm not just trying to head off confrontations during the day. I also look for kids doing things right. Some days, I don't see one worthy event. When we catch them doing peaceful things — sharing toys, giving hugs, helping each other — a link is added to a paper peace chain in their honor. When the peace chain reaches the floor — about 30 links long— the class gets to watch a movie.

(The movies are my least favorite activity, but provide an ultimate payoff to the kids and they do give the teachers a guaranteed quiet time. Two weeks ago we watched a Bob the Builder cartoon that was loaded with recycling propaganda and a simplistic story line in which Bob comes up with a community master plan in one day to win a design competition.)

"S" is a good, smart kid and an expressive singer. She was comforting a friend who went into I-want-my-mommy meltdown mode. Definite peace chain move. And "J," one of the youngest and newest kids who is already on a behavior plan that will get her removed from class if she doesn't respond, did a beautiful job greeting and including a new kid who was wandering aimlessly around the classroom. My second nomination for the day.

Except before the time came to award them, J ran off the rails and S decided it would be fun to be disruptive, too, so J ended up going home with her mom and S took a time out.

After our morning meeting, the kids who listen well get a stamp from the teacher. "JL" didn't get one, and he was distraught, protesting his exclusion as unfair. In these cases, the teachers make the call, and I always defer to their authority, so I tried to help him understand what he needed to do to earn a stamp. He wasn't buying it.

A couple hours later, when it was time to leave the playground and go to lunch, "JL" was hiding out under the climbing equipment. My job is to round up any straggler without turning it into a chase, so I quietly told him, "This is why you didn't get a stamp."

He looked at me and said, "Oh, okay," and went over to the line.

Each day there are variations of these tiny struggles, with different kids and unpredictable outcomes. Because the children are only here as long as they are staying in the shelter, we don't know how long we'll have to work with them. I've seen kids only once, some have gone and come back, and a rare few have stayed longer than a year.

Each time I arrive, it's a new group, with a new set of challenges, and my role as a volunteer is to be sort of a sixth man, bringing in some energy off the bench and spelling the teachers.

I know our team is behind, but I never know how much time is left on the clock.